User Contributed Notes 6 notes

The way I nuderstand it, each value is emitted by a sequence only ONCE. If you retrieve a number (say 12) from a sequence using nextval(), the sequence will advance and subsequent calls to nextval() will return further numbers (after 12) in the sequence.

This means that if you use nextval() to retrieve a value to use as a primary key, you can be guaranteed that no other calls to nextval() on that sequence will return the same value. No race conditions, no transactions required.

As pointed out on a busy site some of the above methods might actually give you an incorrect answer as another record is inserted inbetween your insert and the select. To combat this put it into a transaction and dont commit till you have done all the work